Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMLife is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMAs we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
IRVIN D. YALOMSpecialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
IRVIN D. YALOMNever take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOMThis was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOMDeath loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
IRVIN D. YALOMHe had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
IRVIN D. YALOMThere are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOMTo the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
IRVIN D. YALOMI never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
IRVIN D. YALOMReligion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOMI think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
IRVIN D. YALOM